The reverberations against the brewery floorboards didn't stop. They pulsed, deep and relentless, like a broken heart struggling to beat. Tigran’s gaze snapped from Anahit, still shuddering softly in the grip of the S-Tier sleep afterglow, to the grimy metal door of her back room. He hadn’t felt the tremor directly, but a profound, internal *knowing* settled in his gut. They weren’t at the brewery. “It’s not here,” he rasped, his voice raw, pulling himself away from the wall he’d been leaning against. Nausea knotted his stomach, the familiar metallic taste of dread pooling under his tongue. They’d tracked his anomaly, not Anahit’s operation. His lair. His evolving refuge. Anahit, still shaking off the narcotic torpor, pushed herself upright. “Not here? Then… where, Tigran?” She didn’t need to finish the thought. The thumps intensified, accompanied now by a screeching of stressed metal, a sound that could only mean heavy drilling, attempting to penetrate the thickest barriers. His newly reinforced adamantine doors. A cold, clinical script bloomed in his vision. [URGENT SURVIVAL PROTOCOL INITIATED] [THREAT: TAVUSH CONGLOMERATE PSYCHO-INFILTRATION SQUADS. TARGETING PRIMARY SANCTUARY NODE.] [OBJECTIVE: SABOTAGE CARRIER'S ACOUSTIC NULLIFIERS. DISRUPT FIELD LINK.] [FAILURE: IMMEDIATE SANCTUARY BREACH. NEURAL HARVEST.] “They’re at my place,” Tigran stated, the words flat. He turned to Anahit. “We need to move. Now.” She snatched her worn combat jacket, lines tightening around her mouth. The last vestiges of sleep-induced peace had vanished. “Your place is two blocks over. We’ll have to go through the conduits.” She motioned towards a rusted grate near the ceiling. “It’s tighter than a data-worm’s crawl, but quieter than the street.” The under-streets outside reeked of burnt stimulants beneath pulsing neon. Heavy tracks ground stone to powder outside; the shriek of high-frequency disorienters cut through bellowed orders. Vahan's specialized Cleaners had deployed in full armor, their pupils pinpricks from combat stims. Tigran dragged himself through the exhaust-choked conduit, knees scraping iron grating. Vibrations rattled his teeth as siege rigs hammered the basement doors two blocks away. The Ledger kept his thoughts razor-sharp: silence the roof array, break their perimeter. They slid out through a service run into a dead alley. Six black transports blocked the cross-street. In the center sat the rig—a slab of reinforced durasteel bristling with antenna masts. Circular dishes on its roof hummed, deadening the under-city's roar into an eerie pocket of silence so the line officers could relay orders. Gaunt riflemen in dark plating moved with spastic speed, teeth grinding behind rebreathers. Sonic drills whined against the basement's outer door, a screech that drilled straight into Tigran's raw nerves. Anahit pointed. “Look.” A lone officer surveyed the street from atop the carrier cab, standing unnaturally upright. He was taller than the rest, his armor slightly more ornate. Even from this distance, through the grime-haze, Tigran recognized the rigid posture, the subtle tilt of the head. Cold sweat broke along Tigran's ribs, sharp with sickening recognition. “No,” Tigran whispered, a single word escaping his lips. “It can’t be. Joryn.” Joryn Khavar. Once a brilliant tactical analyst in Tigran's old architecture unit, now moving with mechanical stiffness, his unmasked profile entirely flat. Trepanning scars lined his temples—Vahan's standard lobotomy for insubordinate minds. “He's running the baffles,” Anahit murmured. “Getting onto that rig is suicide, Tigran.” Tigran checked his wrist-dispenser. Killing Joryn would bring the array down with him, but the prompt demanded sabotage, not slaughter. A strange reluctance, irrational and expensive, held his hand from a lethal strike. “No,” Tigran said again, more firmly this time. His eyes scanned the chaotic scene, the swirling dust, the blinding flashes of the drills. He spotted a series of refuse containers, stacked precariously near the command vehicle. “Anahit, draw their eyes away from the roof. Five seconds.” Anahit glanced at the leaning refuse bins, then grinned. "Count to three." She slipped into the shadow of a rusted conduit. Twin concussive noisemakers blew through the trash piles, showering the Cleaners in jagged sheet metal and blinding magnesium glare. Over-stimulated troops staggered back, guns misfiring into the asphalt. Joryn's head snapped toward the blast. This was it. Tigran burst from cover, a blur of motion, clutching a high-pressure sleep-dart injector. He sprinted, ignoring the shouts, the whiz of stray stun-bolts. Tigran vaulted a cracked junction box, catching the carrier's side-ladder. He hauled himself upward, muscles burning, counting the seconds. Joryn turned back just as Tigran vaulted the rim. The modified officer raised a stun-carbine, but Tigran drove the pressurized injector straight into his carotid artery. The cylinder emptied with a sharp click. Joryn’s eyes, fixed on Tigran, flickered. A single, almost imperceptible twitch marred his otherwise inert face. Then, his body went lax. Joryn collapsed across the housing. The acoustic baffles whined, overloaded, and burned out in a spray of blue sparks. The full industrial bellow of Karsak crashed back down into the street; the Chem-Cleaners dropped their drills and clutched their ears in agony. [OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: CARRIER ACOUSTIC BAFFLES SABOTAGED.] [BONUS CONDITION MET: SQUAD LEADER NEUTRALIZED NON-LETHALLY. DATA UPLOAD INITIATED. COLLECTING SQUAD’S STORED REST CYCLES.] "Move!" Anahit shouted from an overhead fire escape, laying down cover fire with her sidearm. Stun bolts began gouging the cab's plating. Tigran dropped to the pavement, knees taking the shock. He sprinted through the crossfire to an unbolted runoff grating, diving into the murky flow as Anahit followed, leaving the panicked troopers behind. He hauled himself up into absolute silence. The masonry absorbed every trace of gunfire and street scream. The sodden concrete box was gone entirely. Instead, he stood in a vast, echoing chamber of polished obsidian and dark, rich wood. The air was cool and still, carrying the faint scent of ozone and something akin to fresh soil. From hidden recesses in the ceiling, soft, golden light diffused, casting no shadows. But the most striking addition were the walls. Embedded in the obsidian, at regular intervals, were sleek, black turrets, barely visible until they swiveled, the faint whir of their internal mechanisms the only sound in the profound quiet. Automated defense turrets. And in the center of the room, on a raised platform, a wide, low bed of intricately woven, dark silk beckoned. [REWARD: 100 HOURS S-TIER SLUMBER] [CELLULAR REGENERATION: 70%] [AUTOMATED DEFENSE TURRETS DEPLOYED] Anahit clambered out of the drain, her clothes clinging to her, her face streaked with grime but her eyes alight with a mixture of awe and exhaustion. She stared at the turrets, then at the opulent bed. “Well,” she breathed, “that’s… something.” She collapsed onto a low, plush cushion that seemed to materialize from the floor. [DATA UPLOAD COMPLETE. FIELD CARRIER LOGS DECRYPTED.] [WARNING: PROTOCOL: MIDNIGHT INITIATION IMMINENT.] [Vahan’s final solution. City-wide neural purge. Designed to smoke out anomaly within 72 standard hours.] Tigran read the final message, the exhaustion momentarily forgotten. He felt a cold dread settle in his chest, deeper than any fear he’d known. A city-wide purge. Vahan wasn’t just coming for him anymore. He was going to burn Karsak to the ground to find him. And he only had three days.

The Insomniac Death Squads